A little over a month ago, publisher Square Enix revealed the release date for hotly anticipated sequel Deus Ex: Mankind Divided as the 23rd of February 2016. Alongside this reveal, they announced the ‘Augment Your Pre-order’ program. Pre-ordering Mankind Divided would give players access to a number of pre-order bonuses. This was to be conducted on a 5-tier system, with tiers unlocking as more people pre-order the game. Confusingly, each tier would only allow you to select one bonus from the 2 or 3 offered on some tiers, meaning you would have to pick between an art book or soundtrack selection for one of your perks. Tier 3 would give players an extra in-game mission, while Tier 5 would see the game’s release date move forward 4 days early. Seriously.

We wanted the program to give you more choice about what you received in terms of pre-order incentives – because we’ve seen in the past that when we choose those packages ourselves, and split them across regions, it has caused frustration. We quickly noticed that this approach created even more frustration than before, resulting in a resounding amount of negative feedback.

Thankfully the publisher has decided to include all of the pre-order incentives with all pre-order and Day 1 copies of the game…with the exception of the early release date. It’s February 23rd for everybody now. Still not sure what they were thinking there. Anybody not buying on day 1 will be able to purchase these perks at a later date.

Augment Your Pre-order was an experiment that ended up being rather poorly thought-out. Square Enix emphasised player choice (a pervading concept throughout the Deus Ex series) but forcing fans to choose between perks fell into the same frustrating pit occupied by retailer exclusive content. Pre-order culture is still full of problems, but hopefully this incident makes publishers aware that their customers feel cheated when their purchase doesn’t give them a full plate of content.